A Docker Machine Learning Python enviroment.

• Module list
• Setup
• How to run
  • First option - docker run
  • Second option - docker-compose up
  • Third option - ./start.sh
• Running Jupyter Notebook or Jupyter Lab
• Further development and customization
• GPU support for xgboost

Pull image from dockerhub. Either the CPU only version or the GPU version. The GPU version requires a CUDA compatible Nvidia GPU and is only supported on Linux computers. The CPU version can be runned on everything that has Docker installed (Linux, macOS and Windows).

docker pull 181192/ml:cpu

# or for the GPU version
docker pull 181192/ml:gpu

First you will need to have Docker installed on you computer.

There is three options for running the docker container.

The first one is to run it by the docker run command. This is the best way if you want to run something specific other than the Jupyter Notebook or Jupyter Lab. This docker image does not start any services for you, but will have everything available if you want to.

For example if you want to run bash in a interactive shell you can run:

docker run --rm -it 181192/ml:cpu

Where the --rm specify to delete the image after you stop the container. This is very useful so you don't end up with a lot of stopped, but not removed containers.

To list all you container you can run docker container ls -a and to remove all stopped container you can run docker rm $(docker ps -a -q).

The -it specify two things first the -i flag is specifying to be interactive, and will keep the STDIN open in the terminal even if it's not attached. The -t will allocate a pseudo-TTY for us to have a terminal into to the container.

To stop the container and exit the containers bash press CTRL+C.

The second option is to use Docker Compose. Docker Compose uses a simple editable YAML-file called docker-compose.yml. In this repository I have created a simple docker-compose file that will create a ml:cpu container and then start Jupyter Lab that would be available on your own computer at localhost:8888. To start Docker Compose run docker-compose up to start and to stop the services press CTRL+C. This will stop the containers, but not remove them. To fully remove use the docker-compose down command.

The third option is to run the start.sh script that I have provided. The script will run either with two defined parameters or use some default.

#!/bin/bash

jupyter="$(jupyter lab --no-browser --ip=0.0.0.0 --allow-root --NotebookApp.token= --notebook-dir='/root')"
volume=${1:-"$(pwd)/notebook"}
start=${2:-$jupyer}

docker run --rm -it -p 8888:8888 --ipc=host --net=host -v $volume:/root 181192/ml:cpu $start

If the parameters is not set the mounted volume will be a folder named notebook located in the folder you start the script from. And then it would lauch Jupyter Lab. If you want to provide a custom path to save your containers notebooks on the host machine you can run for example:

./start.sh ../../my-other-notebooks

To run it with default values just run:

./start.sh

You now have a lot of options to do with our amazing container that contains everything you need to be a real scientific machine learning programmer, etc. to start a Jupyter Notebook or a Jupyter Lab you can run the following command: Replace notebook with lab to start jupyterlab.

docker run --rm -it -p 8888:8888 --ipc=host --net=host 181192/ml:cpu jupyter notebook --no-browser --ip=0.0.0.0 --allow-root --NotebookApp.token= --notebook-dir='/root'

Or if you want to share a volume so your work can be saved.

docker run --rm -it -p 8888:8888 --ipc=host --net=host -v /your-dir:/root/your-dir 181192/ml:cpu jupyter notebook --no-browser --ip=0.0.0.0 --allow-root --NotebookApp.token= --notebook-dir='/root'

For running GPU version you will need nvidia-docker installed, installation guide here:

nvidia-docker run --rm -it -p 8888:8888 --ipc=host --net=host -v /your-dir:/root/your-dir 181192/ml:gpu jupyter notebook --no-browser --ip=0.0.0.0 --allow-root --NotebookApp.token= --notebook-dir='/root'

You can still use the docker command after installing nvidia-docker then you have to pass along --runtime=nvidia:

docker run --rm -it -p 8888:8888 --runtime=nvidia --ipc=host --net=host -v /your-dir:/root/your-dir 181192/ml:gpu jupyter notebook --no-browser --ip=0.0.0.0 --allow-root --NotebookApp.token= --notebook-dir='/root'

You can modify the Dockerfile's as you want and remove and add packages. If you want to add some python packages the easiest is to add them to the requirements.txt file.

Clone GitHub repository:

git clone https://github.com/181192/P030-MLDockerEnv

To build and tag the image you can do the following:

docker build -f Dockerfile.cpu -t ml:cpu .

Where the -f flag is specifying the Dockerfile you want to build. And the -t flag is specifying the tag for the image name:tag.

The building process of this current build will take over an hour to complete, and even longer with the GPU libraries.

To push to your own dockerhub account you can to the following:

Login to Docker Cloud

docker login

Tag your image, replace my_image:tag with your image's name and optional tag, and replace $DOCKER_ID_USER with your Docker Cloud username if needed.

docker tag my_image:tag $DOCKER_ID_USER/my_image:tag

Finally, push your image to Docker Cloud

docker push $DOCKER_ID_USER/my_image:tag

For now I have not updated the GPU image with an xgboost GPU build. It depends on the architecture of the GPU when you compile it. I may update it later and add a requirement to have a 10** series of Nvidia.

When the container is running run:

docker exec -it nameOfTheContainer bash

If you don't know the name of the container run docker container ls to get all running containers.

While inside the bash shell of the running container uninstall xgboost.

pip uninstall xgboost

Clone the xgboost binaries from github.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost
git submodule init
git submodule update

Enter the project folder

cd xgboost 

Make a build directory and enter it.

mkdir build
cd build

Then run CMake as follows with the -D flag USE_CUDA=ON enabled.

cmake .. -DUSE_CUDA=ON

Compile it by running.

make -j4

Then exit the docker container

exit

And commit your changes to the image and tag it.

docker commit 181192/ml:gpu

There, you shall now have compiled xgboost and commited your changes to the docker image and tagged it. You can know stop the container and restart it again as you please because the state is saved.